1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a control system of electrical light, comprises a control method and the apparatus thereof, more particularly to a control system of electrical lighting that is utilized in a place where there are plural rooms or plural areas that need to be individually controlled. The above mentioned rooms refer to any space for human activities; the above mentioned areas refer to the partial spaces of a room or outer periphery of a room.
2. Description of Related Art
With developments of electronic units and electrical controlling methods, an electrical lighting art has been developed to a digital control system, wherein the digital addressable lighting interface (DALI) regulated by IEC 60929 (2003) is a typical example. The regulation is originally applied to a lighting control of fluorescent lamps, but due to the features of reliable, compact and reasonable pricing, the regulation has been applied to all control systems of electrical lighting. In view of the worldwide energy and environment issues, energy-saving is more important than ever, so an auto lighting control system is gradually become necessary.
The conventional digital control system of electrical lighting is an extended art of computer technology, via network like serial bus transferring control information so as to control a control system of electrical lighting, the function thereof is high but the cost thereof is also not low, thus the application thereof is limited and is only applied on some particular occasions.
The digital addressable lighting interface was developed in Europe and then was accepted by the whole world. The structure thereof is basically composed by a bus power supply, at least one controller and lamp controllers having digital addressable lighting interfaces. Each loop of the digital addressable light interfaces can control up to 64 individual lamps; in the initial setting, each of the lamp controllers is assigned with an address code. According to the address, the system can send commands to individual lamp. When utilized, the lamps is preferably to be grouped, after the group data is saved in each memory of the lamps, as disclosed in the European Patent No. 90100465.6, a group can be deemed as one unit for receiving commands. A circuit can be set up to 16 groups (0-15), each of the lamps can be categorized in plural groups at the same time, but the actual applications are varied according to the actual needs, some products only allow setting up one group.
The application of “group” is very important and convenient, e.g. a room is categorized to at least one group, so the controller can individually control the whole room, the controller in the room has be to preset the groups that the controller is about to control so right commands can be sent and no mistake is likely to occur. Take an office for instance, the office has plural rooms and one meeting room. For achieving the object of energy-saving, each of the rooms has to be able to individually controlled, so the electrical lighting can be turned off or lower the brightness when no human is in that particular room. If the lighting in each of the rooms is desired to be individually controlled, then each of the lightings have be to individually assigned with one group code, controllers and sensors related to the room have also to be set to the same group code. Lightings in the meeting room may be categorized to three groups, e.g. one on the platform, one on the meeting table and one for the wall lamps provided on the lateral walls, for meeting the needs of speeches, meetings, or multi media displaying. For more easily to sent commands to each of the lighting groups, a group controller can be provided in each of the rooms, when pressing group keys of the group controller, commands are sent and are received by the particular lighting group, without a doubt that the relationship mentioned above needs to be preset or the group controller and the lightings to be controller would not able to have connections. The method for grouping controllers can refers to The German Patent No. 4327809.4, a general group controller has 4 group selecting keys.
After the operation of grouping, each of the lighting groups can be adjusted to a proper brightness so a whole lighting scene is obtained. On some occasions, e.g. a multi-function meeting room, plural lighting scenes may be needed to meet the different requirements. For preventing from frequent adjustments, a lighting scene controller can be served to save the related information of each of the lighting scenes such as the group number and the brightness into a memory, so by pressing a scene selecting key the original setting can be recalled, a general lighting scene controller has 4 to 8 scene selecting keys.
One features of a system of digital addressable lighting interface is the ability of address searching, and the grouping of the whole system, the scene settings and lighting adjustments are all based on said feature. But the work of initial group setting, scene setting and brightness setting is sometimes complicated that may need skilled people in the art and professional tools to complete.
One loop of a digital addressable lighting interface can has up to 64 controllers, each of the controllers has its own address (a sensor is also deemed as a controller), and objects to be controlled by each of the controllers have to be preset. But by hand-on experiences, for a circuit of a digital addressable lighting interface, the lamps thereof can only be categorized to 16 groups which is not practically enough. For example, more quantity of rooms or more complicated lighting scenes can not be supported by the existing groups so one more loop is therefore needed.